Daycare safety in Georgia — A parents’ guide to choosing quality care

What makes a good daycare?

There are more than 4,200 licensed daycares in Georgia, so surely there is a way to stack them up and compare — or at least weed out the less savory ones.

For the past nine months, I’ve looked at the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning’s website pretty much daily while investigating how the agency regulates child safety and daycare ratings. I’ve also spoken to dozens of lawyers, researchers and parents who have shared their wisdom and warnings about what matters when selecting a daycare.

Some of this research you can do online. Other parts will require you to visit a daycare in person. My hope is that these tips will help you make a more informed decision for your child.

Is the daycare licensed?

The first answer you should find is if the daycare is licensed by the state.

The state also inspects licensed daycares.

How do I read an inspection report?

A licensed daycare should receive one licensing and one monitoring visit from inspectors at DECAL each year.

The reports from these reviews are available for anyone to read online. DECAL publishes a guide on how to read a licensing report.

Inspectors check that the daycare is following rules about safe sleep, staffing ratios, food sizes, maintaining child records and general upkeep of classrooms and playgrounds. They can cite a daycare for breaking these rules or offer technical assistance on how to improve.

To find the inspection reports, visit families.decal.ga.gov/search and look up the daycare you’re interested in. Click “view details” and scroll down to inspection reports. You can download PDFs of each visit.

If the daycare you’re looking at has not met certain rules, you may want to read its plan of improvement in the report. You might also ask the daycare staff about it during a tour.

Repeated violations of the same rule within a year will negatively affect the daycare’s license compliance status but will not change its state quality rating.

This daycare is Quality Rated. What does that mean?

Quality Rated is a three-star rating system that Georgia launched in 2012. It’s a voluntary program for daycares to demonstrate their continuing commitment to quality improvement.

Daycares earn stars by meeting a set of standards, like hiring staff with better credentials, lowering the number of kids in classrooms and allowing state officials to observe how staff interact with children. Daycares can keep their rating for up to three years before state officials reassess.

An investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that DECAL does not reconsider or strip ratings from daycares after citing them for seriously harming or putting kids at risk. Some were even awarded additional stars at their next assessment despite the serious incidents.

That means the star rating is sometimes an unreliable measure for a daycare’s true quality.

“The star rating is just one piece of information that DECAL provides families to support their search for quality child care,” DECAL officials said in a statement.

Has this daycare been in trouble?

There are several ways that Georgia punishes daycares for breaking rules important to child health and safety: fines, suspensions, revocations and emergency closures.

DECAL generally issues fines for $499 when an injury occurs and $299 when there is a repeat rule violation, according to a statement from officials.

The agency has issued larger fines between $2,500 and $10,000 in certain circumstances.

The easiest way to find out why a daycare was fined is to look at the “enforcement actions” part of DECAL’s website. A letter should be linked to each penalty, which says the rule the daycare violated and a synopsis of the incident.

Suspensions or revocations of a daycare’s license are more serious and deserve closer scrutiny.

A suspension means the daycare was required to close its doors and not watch children for a certain number of days.

A revocation means DECAL is taking legal action to take away a daycare’s license to operate. (A quick note: Just because you see a revocation on a daycare’s profile on the state website does not mean that it is not licensed. The daycare may be appealing the decision. Or the daycare may have negotiated a consent agreement with DECAL to make certain changes and do training in order to remain open.)

In the most serious situations, DECAL can request the emergency closure of a daycare for up to 21 days if a child dies or the department believes a child’s safety or welfare is in imminent danger. The daycare has the right to appeal at the Office of State Administrative Hearings.

All of these records contain important information — like the name of the owner, LLC or corporate ownership information, addresses and dates — that can be a jumping-off point for additional research.

(You can visit the DECAL enforcement actions webpage to look at cease and desist orders, denials of applications to open daycares, fines, restricted licenses, emergency actions or revocations of licenses.)

Have other families been dissatisfied with this daycare?

Court records offer additional insight about whether children were harmed at a specific daycare.

You can search the criminal and civil court dockets for most counties on re:SearchGA or PeachCourt. A few counties have their own online systems.

Search variations of the daycare, owner and employee names to check if any criminal charges or civil claims of wrongdoing have been made against them.

What else should I check?

Before enrolling your child at a daycare it is important to consider if it has cameras, liability insurance and enough staff.

Cameras can be an important accountability tool. When touring a daycare, you may want to ask:

• Does the daycare have cameras and where are they in the building?
• Does the video get backed up to a server?
• How long is the video saved before it is recorded over?
• What is the process to view a video?
• Will it cost money to watch the video?

Cameras can provide important information about what happened during an incident involving your child. Georgia daycares are not required by law to have cameras.

Another important item to check is if the daycare is covered by liability insurance. This is what protects your family if something goes wrong.

Daycares are required by law to provide notice in writing if they do not have liability insurance. Be careful not to breeze past it in your enrollment packet.

Finally, it is important to keep tabs on how many children and adults are in your child’s classroom. Georgia sets a maximum number of children by age that an adult can safely watch.

Counting heads and ensuring that your daycare is staying within the required ratio is important to your child’s safety.